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God knows: acquaintance and the nature of divine knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2017

TRAVIS M. DICKINSON
TRAVIS M. DICKINSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001 W. Seminary Dr., Fort Worth, Texas, 76115, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Theists typically believe that God knows all truths. However, accounts of divine omniscience almost always focus on the scope of God's knowledge or perhaps on whether certain kinds of facts are there to be known by God, such as counterfactuals of creaturely freedom or future contingent facts. Very rarely do these accounts include for analysis the nature of God's knowledge. In this article, I develop an acquaintance theory of God's knowledge where acquaintance with an epistemic relation that guarantees that the truth of God's beliefs is necessary for knowledge. I argue that this view achieves an ideal way of knowing, worthy of the divine being.

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 1 - 16
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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